


The Nighttime Fear

by wirewrappedlily



Series: Phoenix [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek keeps losing Stiles, M/M, but Stiles will always come back for him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-27 09:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wirewrappedlily/pseuds/wirewrappedlily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I can't bear to lose you again."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nighttime Fear

"You used _duct tape_ on a _compound fracture_ , Derek! The stupidity of that alone---"

"There was a building falling on me at the time, forgive me for not making a cast out of the _nothing_ I had." 

"You shouldn't have even been there!" Stiles screeched, and Derek ducked him under his arm, pulling him bodily into his side and holding him close. 

"I was there because I smelt the fire before they even got a call. I managed to save three people and an actual box of puppies." The Shetland-sheepdog puppy Derek had come home brandishing like it'd deter Stiles from killing him looked up at Stiles adorably, tilting its head to one side like it couldn't possibly comprehend someone wanting to kill Derek. Stiles was _not_ going to melt. Nope. 

Derek hooked an arm around his waist as he went to move away, drawing him back in backwards and resting his chin on Stiles's shoulder, "You are not off the hook, mister. You are in no way off the hook." 

"Stiles," Derek sighed, reaching to angle his mouth, kissing him long and deep and sweet, "I'm not hurt. I'm here with you; I'm safe." 

"Love you so much, you stupid fuck, you make me nuts." Stiles sighed against his lips, smiling toothily as he nipped Derek's lip and worried it, "You brought me home a puppy." 

Derek shrugged around him, laughing as he kissed Stiles's temple, into his hair, "I knew I was going to be in trouble." 

"You're an evil mastermind." Stiles sighed, "You're training him."

"That's what I figured." Derek laughed at him, "What do you want to name him?" 

"I don't know. Real name, or dog-name?" 

"Depends on the dog-name: Too horrible a dog-name, and I might not love you anymore." Derek teased. 

"I'd say 'Scott', but it'd get confusing. Um...Romano, Samwise, Frodo, Aragorn, Dean, Castiel, Sam, Bobby--no, he doesn't look like a Bobby." 

"Good god, stop." Derek laughed, "None of those. We're going to call him Benedict, because both Sherlock and Holmes are not options." Stiles let out a high squeal of joy, leaping into his arms as he laughed. "Then again: both Benedict and Cumberbatch are pretty bad, too." 

"Kiss me, stupid." Stiles murmured, smiling devilishly before pulling him into a kiss. Derek didn't let up on him; kissing him until his head spun and Benedict was whining at their feet. Stiles leaned into Derek's body then, tucking his head down against Derek's neck and holding on. "You don't know, Derek. You don't know what it's like to face the idea of losing you; to know what it's like to lose you. It's like it was a dream, but it's a dream that I can't shake." 

Derek pushed into him, wrapping around him as tightly as he dared and kissing him like he could take the dream away himself. The scent of pain and loss was muted, old but still defiantly there, making Derek want to hold Stiles tighter; kiss him deeper. He felt a wave of sorrow to match Stiles's at the memory of the history teacher who'd given him a reason to keep going no matter what happened; telling him about the "friend" he'd lost, about the pain it'd caused that he'd never know about because he was gone. Promises that were infinitely ill-advised bubbled to his lips as he rested their foreheads together and simply breathed Stiles in, but Stiles didn't let him speak them, shaking his head slowly like he already knew they were there. 

"Do your best. It's all I can ask." 

"I am hard to kill," Derek teased on a breath, "and you won't let me die." 

"I got _lucky_ , Derek. I'm only human, I can't do what--" Derek cut him off with his mouth, dropping down onto the couch blindly and taking Stiles with him, arranging his limbs with a deftness that spoke of practice. 

"You saved my life. You're my hero." Stiles made a small sound, clinging on to Derek's shirt until his knuckles turned white, pressing like he wanted to climb into Derek and make him a home. 

Stiles reached blindly, finding what he was looking for and yanking hard and fast, Derek jumping around him and snarling as the duct tape ripped from his arm. Derek whimpered, ducking his head against Stiles's collarbone as he whined. "You're okay." Stiles hushed, rubbing his hand through Derek's hair, "You're okay, sourwolf. Just breathe." 

"You just almost died." 

Stiles snorted, "You'd tear your arm clean off before hurting me." 

Derek kissed him loosely, cradling around him while he breathed through the last of the pain. "You're lucky I love you." 

Stiles smiled smarmily, slipping off Derek's lap to scoop up the puppy whining softly at Derek's feet. Derek sighed on the couch, inspecting his arm. A newspaper winged off the back of his head, a wet cloth splatting over his face when he turned to snarl at Stiles for the paper. "Lay down the paper so he doesn't wreck the carpet and clean the blood off your arm before you stain the couch!" 

~

The sound of a gun cocking next to his ear was what woke Derek from his dead sleep, and the missing ball of warmth that was Stiles sleeping in his customary curl around Derek was what got his adrenaline really skyrocketing. He'd dismantled the gun in a total of three moves, launching himself out of the bed...that definitely wasn't his. 

In a series of moves just as smooth as his own, the gun turned into a knife a breath away from his balls. "Stiles?! Stiles, it's me, breathe, love." 

"What are you? A shifter? A changeling? Fairy magic?" It was a kick to Derek's chest that he didn't recognize the light shining in Stiles's dark eyes, that the man in front of him wasn't _his_ Stiles. 

"Something...something's happened...When I went to sleep, I was in bed with my husband, Stiles Stilinski, and our dog, Benedict. I don't know what's happened, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't kill me." 

"What's your name?" 

"Derek Hale."

A flash went through those not-quite-familiar eyes, the knife folding back into his hand, away from Derek's junk. "The Derek Hale from this world--however that works--died five years ago." 

Derek froze, his eyes going wide, "Was it djinn?" 

"How did you know that?" The knife made a reappearance. 

"Because...my Stiles travelled through time to save my life from them." 

Confusion wrote over the nearly-familiar features, "Only mates…" he cut himself off, his eyes dulling. "I never got that chance." 

Derek swallowed slowly, "I'm sorry." 

"Get up, we need to get you home." 

Derek fumbled to comply, rolling out of bed with his hands raised in supplication, worn and over-aged amber eyes watching him the entire time. Stiles huffed as he stood himself, rolling his shoulders to the sound of a myriad of cracks and creaks that weren't in the bones of Derek's Stiles. Scars dotted his hands, his forearms. Derek was sure there were more, his loose shirt ill-fitting in a different way than when Stiles would slither into Derek's shirts, his bones stark beneath the battered skin, as if he hadn't had a proper meal for a while. The room was thick with Stiles's scent, tinged with sorrow, anger, grief, depression--laden with a bone-aching fatigue that Derek could read resting in the tension of the man's shoulders. "Thank you." 

"Don't thank me, I'm not doing it for you; I'm doing it so I don't have to put up with this, so I don't have to know anything more." Stiles bit off, shoving his feet into combat boots that were so different from the ratty sneakers Stiles favoured. 

The bitter sting of that statement made Derek draw back on himself, made him want to recoil. This wasn't the Stiles he knew and loved; the man before him was entirely different to his mate and husband. "What happened to you?" Derek breathed the question, half-expecting Stiles not to hear him. 

Dark eyes snapped up at him, furious, cheeks pale and lips pulled thin, "You did." 

~

The Jeep had died a fiery death, Derek learned, caught in the crossfire of Molotov cocktails and the trees come alive on one horrific night in the beginning of Beacon Hills's end. It'd been crunched under the base of a tree that looked as if it was snarling, blue peeking out from beneath the twisted black tower of the tree. Stiles had been the one to set it ablaze. 

Lydia was gone, as was Jackson. Erica and Isaac had died; Boyd had committed suicide by taking on the rugaru that had killed them. Danny had created a safe haven of an underground bunker with Allison, but Scott had gone mad; had turned on the Sheriff and had been taken down by hunters the moment they caught up to him. 

"The wards in the trees were broken, there was no way to fix them. All the evil Beacon Hills had been hiding came flooding out like it was a fucking Hellmouth." Stiles told him irritably as he burned rubber through the streets, most buildings burned out, some still burning. "We even have fucking Turok-Han." A purple-grey monster that looked as though it'd never seen the light of day came lurching out from the alley beside what had once been Stiles's favourite Chinese place, Stiles shifting gears and gunning it even harder in the monstrous truck he'd had to swing himself up to successfully get into. 

"All this…" Derek breathed. He wondered obliquely if he would have been able to change anything if he'd lived through the first wave of horrors to come out of the trees. 

"All this and more." Stiles told him, voice flat with all he'd seen; all he'd done. 

Derek looked over at him, the thousand-yard stare; the way he was barely surviving, daring the world to let him die by living in the mess of the town instead of below ground with the others. The Alpha and the mate in Derek still reacted with the instinct to protect the man sitting in the driver's seat of a car that seemed like it'd eat him if he wasn't careful; but he knew, knew by scent and sight and just sheer gut feeling that this man was not his to protect--to bully or cajole into taking better care of himself. Trying it would only make things all the worse. 

"Your world. What's it like?" Stiles asked, as if he was sensing the judgement and wanted to cut it off like a cheating husband's nuts. 

"...I don't think you want to know." Derek answered slowly. 

A muscle in Stiles's jaw twitched. If he were Derek's Stiles, Derek would start talking about anything and everything else. As it was, Derek had to bite his tongue to keep from saying a word. "You said...you said that you fell asleep with...your husband." 

"Married three years ago. I proposed after I got trapped in a burning building...because he found out I'd already all-but married him on paper, and nearly took my head off for not telling him." Derek knew his voice was dripping with the happiness of the memory. 

"He...time travelled?" 

"In my world, Stiles Stilinski wasn't only a sixteen-year-old I caught looking for Scott's inhaler in my backyard. He had the djinn take him to a month before the fire as a substitute history teacher, and he befriended me, gave me a reason to hang on harder than I would have. When I met him in my backyard...I already knew." Derek told him simply. 

Stiles swallowed, blinking slowly, "Did he remember?" 

"Not for years. Not until time caught up with itself and he'd reached the same age he'd been when it would have happened." Derek looked down at his legs in the darkness, "He told me that the entire life he'd led before was like a dream he couldn't shake, and I think some of it had meshed with our life as it is, but...the part he doesn't ever lose is...what it was like for him, when I died." 

"It was like being ripped into pieces and losing every hope of happiness there could ever be." Stiles told him, voice strangled. "Bastard never told me I was his mate; never gave me the chance." 

Derek stopped breathing for the pain, shared in him through nothing more than the idea of what the same would mean for him. What losing Stiles would do to him, without question. 

"If you think you can imagine, you're wrong." Stiles grit out. "You have no idea. I hope you never do." 

Derek didn't smell the death through the vault door into Danny's underground, but as the blood ran like a tidal wave, the pale flash of dismembered limbs in the muck of it, he didn't have the chance to react before a shadow had leapt from the darkness beyond the entrance, it's claws and fangs slicing through Stiles before he could finish yelling for Derek to run. 

Darkness overtook Derek with bile in the back of his throat and a kick in his chest that made him wonder if he was about to die. 

~

"Derek?!" Stiles's voice called to him, worried and confused, but it was a struggle to open his eyes. 

Derek's gaze fell on Stiles, and he yanked the younger man into his arms before he could properly breathe. 

"Derek, buddy, I missed you, too--what the hell's going on?" Stiles patted his back like they weren't so far past the point of being 'just friends'...and Derek's heart stopped all over again, because the Stiles in his arms still wasn't his; Ian standing further up the Irish coast, his own expression perplexed, wearing the wedding ring that belonged on Derek's finger. 

"Something's wrong--something's very wrong, Stiles." The fact that he'd just watched Stiles get shredded warred with the fact that this Stiles wasn't his, either. "I was just...it's hard to explain, but I was just in another world, and I don't belong to this one." 

Stiles looked to Ian, letting him pull Stiles to his feet and the two of them helping Derek to stand. 

"In the world I'm from...you live in America still, and you and Ian are only friends." 

"The pack and you interrupted the midsummer festival?" Ian asked. 

"Yeah...Stiles chose to come home with us." Jealousy was ugly and irrational and not a good colour on Derek, he knew that. 

"Derek, let's get you to the cottage; Grams will be able to tell us something, I'm sure." 

"In the world I was just in, you were in Beacon Hills and I'd died, and the wards keeping all the evil Beacon Hills was hiding at bay were all broken. We were going to find Danny and Allison, but something had gotten there first--" 

"Derek, calm down, just breathe. We'll see what's going on; we'll get you home." Stiles promised him, eyes huge and earnest. 

"I need to talk to the version of me that belongs here--why didn't I interrupt the midsummer festival?" Stiles held up his hands before the thousand other questions on Derek's lips could pour forth. 

"In your world the fairies took me?" Derek nodded, "In this one, I chose to go." 

How was the Derek of this world still _alive_ having lost his mate like that? Having his mate choose another? 

"We...Derek in this world and I got into a fight. He told me to never set foot in his life again...so I haven't." Stiles's head was ducked as he shrugged at that, like it wasn't making Derek want to tear this other him apart. Like it wasn't breaking his heart. 

He closed his eyes and bit back the pain, and when he opened them again, Stiles was staring blearily up at him from his hospital bed, sickly and pale and...and dying. 

"Sourwolf…" Stiles reached a trembling hand for his fingers, his lips twitching, "Thanks for trying." 

Stiles died quietly, his eyes slipping closed and his hand falling back to the bed limply, the forearm attached wrapped with a bandage that Derek knew hid a wound that was in the shape of his teeth; was the bite, the gift...an attempt to save Stiles's life if the sickness Derek could smell was anything to go by. Derek wanted to throw himself out the window; he wanted to scream. He remembered Stiles getting sick like this; remembered taking out the coven that had caused it, syphoning off Stiles's innate power for wealth, money, and power. 

Worlds in which Stiles hadn't survived to meet him; worlds in which he'd been the one to kill Stiles himself; where Scott had lost control and done it for him; where blow after blow to that brilliant, insane head had taken Stiles before he could do a damn thing. Kate and Peter; Chris; Gerard; the kamina; the Alphas. All the different ways in which Stiles could have been taken from him, by death or no. 

It ended in the hospital, Melissa bending over him with red-rimmed eyes. "Stiles." 

Her eyes widened, her heart spinning into a sprint. "D-Derek, you need--" 

" _Stiles_." 

She took a deep breath, building herself up, but Derek almost already knew the answer. "Hunters broke into the house. Shot you with a new wolfsbane, a hallucinogen of sorts."

"That doesn't answer me." 

"They...They stabbed him." 

Derek grit his teeth and got up, unable to stay lying there. Melissa followed him in a flurry of nursely fury, but it fell on deaf ears. Derek had bigger fish to fry; had his husband to bring back to him. He discharged himself, striding to where Lydia was waiting for him with a familiar leather jacket hung over her arm and a look of wrath to match his. 

"Welcome back, boss. Let's go get your better half, shall we?" 

~

The clock was ticking to midnight, signalling the end of the first anniversary of Stiles's death. Derek could hear it from the hallway, the bottle hanging dejectedly from between his fingers. 

He wished he could get drunk; wished he could ask Erica to just kill him and be done with it. He wished he wasn't a werewolf, that Stiles had been safe with Ian, far away from him, but alive. Wished that for all the strings he'd pulled and all the powers he'd tempted, that they could have brought Stiles back, even for a day. Fae, djinn, vampires, weres, witches--monsters the world over and then over again, all friends of Stiles. None able to bring him back. 

There were footsteps as midnight chimed, padding towards him hesitantly before whoever it was took the bottle from his fingers with ease, pulling him up by the hands. "You can't get drunk, but you certainly managed to drown out your sense of smell, sourwolf." 

Derek fell on Stiles's mouth like a dying man, and Stiles simply bore up. "How?" 

"If you have to ask, it's not a gift." Derek held him tighter, "I'm here, though. I'm here to stay." 

Tears were running down Derek's cheeks, his body swaying because he felt like he couldn't bear to stand. Stiles took his weight, moving them down the hall of the apartment Erica had browbeaten him into, folding him into the tub, folding himself in after him, even though it was too small by half for Derek on his own. "I can't bear to lose you again." 

Stiles kissed him, pressing the promise into his mouth, "I know the feeling."


End file.
